Nimbo: Light-Filled Genoa Apartment Woven with Historic Detail Charm
Nimbo unfolds inside an early apartment in Genoa, Italy, suspended above the historic center in the Castelletto district. Designed by Giulia Grillo in 2025, the renovation traces shifting light, restored terrazzo, and Moroccan cement tiles as they anchor a more fluid, contemporary sequence. Rooms hold views of sea and city, yet keep the quiet cadence of a bourgeois neighborhood shaped by tree-lined boulevards and wrought-iron railings.
From the tree-lined avenue atop Genoa’s hillside, daylight slips between plane trees and wrought-iron railings before pouring through the apartment’s tall windows. Inside, that light brushes terrazzo and parquet, then breaks across soft-toned tiles in a calm, measured rhythm.
Nimbo is a renovated apartment in the Castelletto district of Genoa, Italy, shaped by designer Giulia Grillo around the movement of natural light and the persistence of memory. The project treats the rooms as an inward-looking court, keeping them intimate while still tied to glimpses of sea and city. Interior choices follow that thread, translating the neighborhood’s quiet boulevards and eclectic palaces into restrained surfaces, restored finishes, and a precise contemporary layout.
Tracing Genoese Light
Light in Castelletto feels unusually clear, reflecting off honey-colored facades before sliding along the elevations toward the harbor. Inside the apartment, that clarity remains, but it slows as it moves across restored floors and along painted walls. Shadows track the day from room to room, so each threshold reads as a slight shift in tone rather than a hard division. Every window keeps a fragment of the outside world, turning sea, skyline, and foliage into changing panels.
Restoring Floors And Memory
The original terrazzo and parquet with geometric inlays anchor the apartment and hold its history close underfoot. Grillo restores these surfaces, then allows the updated layout to move more freely around them rather than erasing their pattern. In rooms where intervention is stronger, Moroccan cement tiles in soft tones act as a quiet bridge between old and new. That restrained palette keeps attention on texture and rhythm, not showy contrast.
Rooms As Inner Courtyard
The square plan lends itself to a sequence that feels like circling an internal courtyard, with each room slightly adjusted in scale and light. Instead of a grand axial gesture, there is a calm loop that threads living, dining, and more private rooms together. Openings give glimpses ahead, yet corners still provide pause and shelter, an arrangement that suits the measured character of the district outside. Everyday life unfolds in short crossings, not long corridors.
Historic Elements In Quiet Use
Period elements remain legible and active in daily use rather than set aside as relics. Stucco ceilings carry gentle ornament above the more contemporary arrangement below, and their depth catches light in shallow relief. Cast-iron radiators line the walls, their sturdy profiles punctuating otherwise smooth surfaces and reminding residents of the building’s age. Bay windows, conceived as small domestic piazzas, pull people toward the perimeter to sit, look out, and let the city’s distant movement frame quiet routines.
Landscape Beyond The Glass
From the windows overlooking Castelletto, views open to the sea and to the dense historic center below, a layered backdrop that shifts with weather and hour. Light bounces off water, grazes the honey-colored facades, then finds its way back into the rooms as a softer echo. That exchange keeps the interior in ongoing conversation with the hillside neighborhood and the harbor beyond. Even on still days, the apartment holds a slow, luminous drift between stone, memory, and water.
In the end, Nimbo reads as both lookout and retreat, balanced between the fairy-tale silhouette of Castello Mackenzie and the working port below. Restored floors, preserved details, and measured new surfaces keep the home tied to its context while supporting a more fluid way of living. The apartment stays quietly open to Genoa’s vertical light, letting every change outside register gently within.
Photography by Studio Campo
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